Ren Yi Hooi

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Ren Yi Hooi is the founder of Lightning Reach, the UK financial-support platform she started during the Covid-19 pandemic. Originally from Singapore, she read economics at UC Berkeley and holds an MBA from the Wharton School, and came to the UK on a Tech Nation Exceptional Talent visa.

Her career before founding the company ran through consulting and financial inclusion across three continents: Bain & Company in Singapore, the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States, and a spell as country manager for BIMA, the mobile insurance provider serving underserved customers in emerging markets, where she launched the Malaysian operation. She then joined banking-as-a-service platform Railsbank as Product Director and Director of Financial Inclusion, building LightningAid, an emergency payments product that became the seed of her own company.

She built Lightning Reach as a solo first-time founder, raising £1m in 2023 led by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with Big Issue Invest and Barrow Cadbury Trust, and growing the platform past 300,000 users and £25m in support delivered. Following the company's acquisition by European Technology Group in July 2026, Hooi handed the chief executive role to Rhiannon Sheridan and moved to the board as a director. She is a Senior Visiting Practitioner at the University of York's Administrative Fairness Lab and has been named in the WISE100 and the Women in FinTech Powerlist.